Pop Gear

Gonks Go Beat

I’ve Gotta Horse

Three Hats for Lisa

Be My Guest

Catch Us If You Can

Help!

Up Jumped a Swagman

Cuckoo Patrol

Dateline Diamonds

January

The intervening years have given Associated British Pathé’s Pop Gear an archival relevance that it did not own in 1965. Despite the hastily contrived treatment these performers and groups, miming to their recordings, receive from producer Harry Field and director Frederic Goode, we at least have this depository of a slice of British pop music circa 1964. Presumably, the sole purpose of its credited writer Roger Dunton was to provide disc jockey Jimmy Savile with some bare bones linking comments between the acts. Thanks to modern technology not available in the mid-sixties, we may decide to swiftly move on from these. Anyway, Matt Monro, the most veteran of the film’s guests, has already alerted us as to what we are in for in John and Joan Shakespeare’s title song:

The real meat of Pop Gear is sandwiched between an opening sequence of The Beatles performing ‘She Loves You’ and a final sequence of them singing Phil Medley and Bert Berns’s ‘Twist and Shout’, both songs being borrowed from a Pathé film. In between, this glorious celebration of the state of British pop as it approached the mid-sixties does what its highly respected senior statesman balladeer Monro has promised.